New Code (2008) is the fourth outing by an octet (previously a sextet, subsequently expanded) led by cellist and composer Lee, a woman active in various artistic settings in the Vancouver area who has collaborated – among others – with Wayne Horvitz, Dave Douglas, Nels Cline and Bill Frisell. The latter’s influence is evident in [...]

Admittedly, your reviewer is still far from enlightenment in regard to the generation of Unter Den Linden. Christophe Charles refers to a concert by Mark Fell in 2009 as a “Grundton” for the composition, then specifies that sources recorded in the same year and in 1987 (!) were also used. Then again, there’s a mention [...]

Tzadik “What I’m seeking to discover”, writes composer and violist John King, “is the unity of, rather than the distinction between, determinate, indeterminate and improvised music”. He refers to this as “trilogic unity”, employing any necessary means to reach a satisfactory interaction of the separate components. 10 Mysteries – performed by King as a member [...]

Born in 1971, Dave Stone grew up as a multi instrumentalist but as an improviser has specialized in reeds, sharing experiences with several central figures of the St. Louis jazz scene (all of them quite mysterious to the author, who doesn’t miss a chance to prove his enduring lack of knowledge despite four abundant decades [...]

Release The Baths Two sides (yes, it is a vinyl) of chiming-and-droning grace, a modicum of found sounds and voices from the street – a matter of minutes, really – and even fewer piano notes in the closing stages of the first half. A sinisterly gentler side of Wright, already perceived on his previous An [...]

Black Truffle In this concert, recorded at the Kitakyushu Performing Arts Centre in 2009, three distinct and very strong personalities construct a sonic edifice derived by a combination of experimentation, intensity and desire to abandon any inclination to affirm a status or define a genre. Ambarchi manipulates the guitar according to his renown, amassing imposing [...]

Aural Terrains By disregarding any potential concern for manifestations that might be loosely associated to a notion of “tonality” (or just consonance), Chrysakis (laptop, electronics, rototom), Matthews (digital synthesis, field recordings) and Bernal-Villegas (percussion) gave origin to six very interesting and uniquely sounding improvisations. The kind of interaction that one gladly listens to, immediately appreciating [...]

TIM BLECHMANN / SEIJIRO MURAYAMA – 347 Recorded in Paris at La Comète 347, this CD presents an episode of the activities of Blechmann and Murayama intent in capturing different types of resonance in a large room, aiding themselves by various boxes of speakers and a snare drum. This is a classic case of document [...]

Nonvisualobjects Asher’s “Selected Passages” is fashioned after the ultimate residues of a research on acoustic materials gathered in 2008 (partially heard in the Intervals album). Following the investigation of field recordings, radio snippets and the sounds of a piano found in a room of his Vermont residency at that time, he focused himself on the [...]

At last I managed to listen to a CD that was floating on my desk since ages ago; shame on me, as always. At any rate, “casa” means “house” in Spanish (and Italian, too). The title comes from the recording place: you guessed right, at Sergio Merce’s home in Merlo, Argentina. The pair has been [...]

JESSE STACKEN – Magnolia Jesse Stacken is a member of the Peter Van Huffel Quartet, and that’s how I first came across his playing. This album – which features bassist Eivind Opsvik and drummer Jeff Davis – reveals him as a versatile, sensible pianist and composer per se, whose interests reside halfway through the exploration [...]

A conceptual prolongation of his previous Flock And Tumble (also on Sonoris), Furl incarnates a somewhat more structured version of Seth Nehil’s accumulation of organic, environmental and instrumental substances. It is difficult to approach this work without thinking of it as a cycle of compositions, for the chains of events appear planned with extreme care. [...]

Hot Cup If “smooth” jazz (by the way, what the hell does that mean?) is comparable to a classic seduction in lingerie frequently ending in a “sorry-darling-it-was-not-my-night” failure, Mostly Other People Do The Killing are the big-bosom freckled girl that plops on your pelvis and proceeds to teach you everything in a single lesson. Arrived [...]

Being quite active in other lines of work (a naturalist providing recordings of environments for movies and documentaries) sound designer Douglas Quin does not publish the fruits of his research with excessive frequency (the last I recall from him was the wonderful Oropendola – we’re talking 1994 or so). But there’s no doubt about the [...]

Known two decades ago as Violence And The Sacred (I still have one of the early LPs, Suture Self – this writer is getting old, you see) VioSac is basically Graham Stewart, from Ontario, who transform into (not always) wacky sounds the many suggestions that buzz in his mind, with just a little help from [...]

Killer Penguin After four years from the great Attack Of The Killer Penguins, Welsh trombonist Gareth Roberts and his comrades – trumpeter Gethin Liddington, pianist Paul Jones, bassist Chris O’Connor and drummer Mark O’Connor – come back to help us forgetting the hard times in which we live, at least for 53 minutes. The fusion [...]

Humi was a duo formed by the late Hugh Hopper (bass, loops and electronics) and Yumi Hara Cawkwell (voice, keyboards and percussion). Concerning the latter, I remember having detested her vocalizations in another release on this imprint – Upstream with Geoff Leigh – so the nastiest thoughts were starting to materialize in my mind. Luckily, [...]

Monotype Turbulently logical as always, Ferran Fages and Alfredo Costa Monteiro organize a palette of noises generated by “feedback mixing board, pickups and objects on electric guitar” brilliantly, the resulting concoction qualifying more as composition than improvisation given the level of intricacy of its spontaneous design. The “interplay” has reached a point of reciprocal perceptiveness [...]

Norwegian Paulsen set himself out to restore some dignity to a pair of ancient instruments lying around the house, whose strings were about 30 years old. He applied contact microphones and a minimum of effects to the aged boxes, utilizing fingers, bows and eBow plus minor preparations such as wooden sticks to elicit nicely resonant [...]

OK, so Bruce Gilbert is a pretty illustrious name – Dome, Wire, etc. Too bad that, after the partial delusion generated in yours truly by the more recent Oblivio Agitatum (same label), I still can’t validate the raison d’être of such a consideration by listening to This Way, an album originally released in 1984 and [...]

Siren In keeping with the unlimited consistency that has characterized his craft over the decades (regretfully overlooked by certain specialized press when they reviewed the Sanctus / Amen / Omega trilogy: alter your course of action against a critic’s expectations and a bad reaction is guaranteed) David Jackman continues to exercise a deep interest in [...]

The idea of Belgian Joris Vanvinckenroye – composing scores for solo double bass, superimposing the parts and utilizing the instrument’s traits to form lines, counterpoints and a rhythm section all alone – is good enough. The problem is that, even with a skilled performer behind it, Cycles is too harmonically light to be considered worthy [...]

Swarf is a three-inch CD containing 20 minutes composed by gathering gentle noises emitted via bowed steel rods with sheet steel resonator, edited in consecutive loops and logical sequences in order to let them appear like veritable pieces of music. Obviously comparable to an acoustic sculpture or an installation – think a cross of a [...]